She felt a hand rest on the back of her neck, felt newly familiar fingers stroke gently along her nape, turned, and met Ben’s eyes just long enough to see the concern and affection in his expression.

A short, jagged breath made its way into her mum’s lungs. It wouldn’t be long. Jess knew that without needing to be told. And the knowledge caused a wave of panic that had been ebbing and flowing throughout the night to rise into her throat with a need to mark the moment, to make this last sliver of time count for something.

She watched Mia kneel beside her, watched her daughter smooth her fingers across the papery skin of Audrey’s forehead. Glancing sideways, she saw a lone tear trickle down Phoebe’s cheek.

Jess took her mum’s hand, stroked the back of it with the pad of her thumb, wanting her mum to know she was there, that they were all there. Leaning forward she whispered in her mum’s ear, words of tenderness and gratitude that had, for so many years, remained unspoken: a torrent of love she hoped might seep into her mum’s consciousness, to be heard and understood before it was too late.

Jess turned her head, caught Lily’s eye, and nodded.

Chapter 68

Lily

Lily unscrewed the lid, inserted the syringe, and drew up the medicine inside. Slowly, carefully, one drop at a time, she dripped the liquid morphine onto her mum’s tongue.

Her mum’s lips closed, as if in slow motion, and then gradually opened again, the sound of her tongue peeling from the dry roof of her mouth echoing around the room.

Lily waited for the next breath to come but her mum lay there, inert, her jaw slack, lips parted, body unmoving.

And just at the point Lily thought the moment had arrived, her mum took in another short, jarring breath, her chest rising and holding on to the air as if her body knew how very precious every last atom was.

She brought her face close to her mum’s, breathed in the sharp acetone odor on her breath as she kissed her forehead, knew from the last time, twenty-eight years ago, what that smell meant.

Lily rested her cheek against the back of her mum’s hand, brought her lips to her mum’s arid skin—skin she had kissed a thousand times before yet never with the significance with which she kissed it now—and felt the first of her tears begin to fall.

As another breath rattled in and out, Lily noticed the tiniest movement in her mum’s mouth: a fractional upending of her lips.

A smile.

Her mum was smiling. Infinitesimal and yet, to Lily, momentous.

Chapter 69

Audrey

There is something bitter on her tongue. Something metallic and bitter as though her mouth is coated in mercury. It is a familiar taste but only recently so.

She manages to close her lips although her bottom jaw feels heavy and her head wants to sink back onto the pillow. But there is something hard underneath her skull. Something is holding her head at a distance higher than the pillow, causing her neck muscles to strain against the effort.